Vatican recognizes Jews' messiah claim / Scholarly paper says Catholics must regard Old Testament as retaining all of its value

Melinda Henneberger, New York Times

Published 4:00 am, Friday, January 18, 2002

2002-01-18 04:00:00 PDT Vatican City -- The Vatican recently issued what some Jewish scholars are calling an important document that explicitly says, "The Jewish messianic wait is not in vain."

The scholarly work, effectively a rejection of and apology for the way some Christians have viewed the Old Testament, was signed by the pope's own theologian, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

The document says Jews and Christians in fact share their wait for the messiah, although Jews are waiting for the first coming, and Christians for the second.

"The difference consists in the fact that for us, he who will come will have the same traits of that Jesus who has already come," wrote Ratzinger, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

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At least one Jewish scholar said the new document is a marked departure from a study of the redemptive role of Jesus that was released last year in Ratzinger's name and that fanned disputes between Catholic and Jewish scholars.

The new document also says Catholics must regard the Old Testament as "retaining all of its value, not just as literature, but its moral value," said Joaquin Navarro-Valls, the pope's spokesman. "You cannot say, 'Now that Jesus has come, it becomes a second-rate document.'

"The expectancy of the Messiah was in the Old Testament, and if the Old Testament keeps its value, then it keeps that as a value, too. It says you cannot just say all the Jews are wrong and we are right."

Asked whether that could be taken to mean that the messiah may or may not have come, the pope's spokesman said no. "It means it would be wrong for a Catholic to wait for the messiah, but not for a Jew."

The document, the result of years of work by the Pontifical Biblical Commission, goes on to apologize for the fact that certain New Testament passages that criticize the Pharisees, for example, have been used to justify anti-Semitism.

Everything in the report is now considered part of official church doctrine,

Navarro-Valls said.

A number of Jewish scholars and leaders said they were pleased but stunned and would have to take some time to digest fully the complicated, 210-page study, so far published only in French and Italian.

"This latest declaration is a step forward" in closing the wounds opened by Ratzinger's earlier document, said Rabbi Alberto Piattelli, a professor and leader of the Jewish community in Rome. "It recognizes the value of the Jewish position regarding the wait for the messiah, changes the whole exegesis of biblical studies, and restores our biblical passages to their original meaning.

I was surprised."

At least initially, the only voices of dissent were on the Catholic side, where some traditionalists said they felt the church under Pope John Paul II has done altogether too much apologizing already.

Vittorio Messori, a Catholic writer and commentator, said he respects the pope, but "his apologies leave me perplexed. He's inspired and has his reasons,

but what's dangerous in these apologies is that he seems to say the church itself" -- rather than just some within the church -- "has been wrong in its teaching."

Andrea Riccardi, the founder of the Sant'Egidio community, a left-leaning Catholic group with a history of mediating international conflicts and promoting religious dialogue, said he was most impressed by the depth of the document.